About Bob Kaufman Essay, Research Paper
Kathryne V. Lindberg
Poet, prose poet, jazz performance artist, satirist, manifesto
writer, and legendary figure in the Beat movement, Bob Kaufman successfully promoted both
anonymity and myths of his racial identity and class origins. While romanticized
biographies ascribe to him such epithets as griot, shaman, saint, and prophet of
Caribbean, African, Native American, Catholic, and/or Jewish traditions, respectively,
Kaufman was most likely the tenth of thirteen children of an African American and part
Jewish father and a schoolteacher mother from an old New Orleans African American Catholic
family. After an orderly childhood that probably included a secondary education, he joined
the merchant marine and became active in the radical Seafarer’s Union. An itinerant
drifter and self-taught poet (but for a brief stint at the New School for Social Research
and among the Black Arts and Beat literati of New York), he identified with the lives and
cryptically quoted the works of poet-heroes such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Arthur
Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Federico Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein,
Langston Hughes, Frantz Fanon, Aim? C?saire, and Nicholas Guill?n, as well as
improvisational artists and jazz musicians, including Charlie Parker, after whom he named
his only son. In individual poems he is, variously, an experimental stylist in the Whitman
tradition ("The American Sun"), a French surrealist and existentialist
("Camus: I Want to Know"), a jazz poet after Langston Hughes, and in dialogue
with bebop and the Black Arts movement ("African Dream," "Walking Parker
Home").
Still "minor," compared to his white bohemian contemporaries, as editor of Beatitude,
a San Francisco literary magazine, Kaufman is credited by some with coining
"Beat" and exemplifying its voluntarily desolate lifestyle. He enjoyed an
underground existence as a "poets’ poet" (in Amiri Baraka’s poem
"Meditation on Bob Kaufman," Sulfur, Fall 1991) and as a legendary
performer in the much memorialized street scenes of San Francisco’s North Beach and New
York’s Greenwich Village during the late 1950s through the late 1970s. Kaufman is best
known for short lyric poems in African American (Langston Hughes, ed., The New Negro
Poetry, 1964, being the first) and avant-garde anthologies (New Directions in Prose
and Poetry, #17, 1967, covering poetry and prose; The Portable Beat Reader, 1992).
Works originally published by City Lights Bookstore of San Francisco are collected in two
New Directions publications, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965) and The
Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 (1981). Three early broadsides, Abomunist
Manifesto (1959), Second April (1959), and Does the Secret Mind Whisper? (1960)
extend his eclectic aesthetics into prose fiction and programmatic prose poetry. The
Golden Sardine (1967) was translated and influential in France (as William
Burroughs, Claude Pelieu, Bob Kaufman, Paris, 1967). The latter, along with South
American and other translations, have earned Kaufman a wider reputation abroad than among
mainstream critics in the United States.
Rather than address electoral, protest, or even literary politics in traditional ways,
his elusive and allusive writings as well as his tragicomic life sustain a critique of the
subtle rules and terrible punishments that, as he knew them, enforce American bourgeois
values of race, class, sexuality, and rationality. Answering McCarthyism, Beat, and Black
Arts manifestos with Dadaist anarchism and surrealist irrationalism, "Abomunism"
(his contraction of, among other things, communism, atom bomb, Bob
Kaufman, and abomination), is serious in its "black humor."
From the late 1960s onward, through stretches of withdrawal and suffering the ill effects
of political blacklisting and harassment, alcohol, drugs, electroshock treatments, and
imprisonment, Kaufman recorded both with humor and pathos the pain of society’s victims.
While no booklength study has yet been devoted to Kaufman, several recent essays affirm
his deceptively broad intellectual interests and the ambiguous power of individual acts of
cultural resistance in the continuing struggles of oppressed peoples.
See also: Barbara Christian, "Whatever Happened to Bob Kaufman?" Black
World 21 (Sept. 1972): 20-29. Maha Damon, "’Unmeaning Jargon’ / Uncanonized
Beatitude: Bob Kaufman, Poet," South Atlantic Quarterly 87.4 (Fall 1988):
701-741. Kathryne V. Lindberg, "Bob Kaufman, Sir Real," Talisman 11 (Fall
1993): 167-182. Gerald Nicosian, ed., Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman, 1996.
From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright ? 1997 by
Oxford University Press.
Maria Damon
Kaufman’s case illustrates the role and position of a writer in
certain social and historical circumstances: his biographical status as stereotyped Beat
legend and overlooked Black poet complements, even as it can obscure, the problematics of
a marginal writer’s relationship to modernism. His work exemplifies a m?lange of many of
the cultural trends of the American 1950s and 1960s: the "individualism versus
groupism" model for understanding social dynamics prevalent in the era of McCarthy
and the Beats; the popularizing of European modernist developments such as surrealism and
existential philosophy; and the blending of these European influences with
African-American themes and structures. A quintessential subcultural poet, Kaufman is at
once multiply marginal and properly paradigmatic; embodying the mainstream trends and
stereotypes of his era, his work is at once high-cultural and streetwise. For example, as
Charles Nilon has pointed out, although Kaufman writes in Standard English laden with
allusions to Camus, Picasso, and Miro, he also employs street language, Black American
verbal structures (rapping, running it down, and signifying) and jazz modalities in
his verse.
From The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry. Copyright
? 1993 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.
A. Robert LeeThough born in New Orleans of a Catholic black mother and Jewish
father, raised in the Lower East Side (whose human variety he warms to while condemning
its squalor and poverty as in pieces like ‘East Fifth St. (N.Y.)’ and ‘TeeVeePeople’), and
with twenty years in the Merchant Marine to follow, Bob Kaufman has long been best known
as a controversial, drugs-and-poetry doyen of San Francisco. Despite the drug habits which
led to several jail terms, or the self-denying and Buddhist ten-year vow of silence from
1963-73 taken to protest John Kennedy’s assassination, his adopted city, on his death in
January 1986, appointed 18 April ‘Bob Kaufman Day’ as well as naming a street after him.
It was Kaufman, too, no doubt appropriately for the counterculture voice which in
‘Benediction’ had once told America –’Everyday your people get more and more/Cars,
television, sickness death dreams./You must have been great/alive’–who had a shaping part
in creating with the journalist Herb Caen the term ‘beatnik’.
Throughout the 1950s and early West Coast 1960s (if less so afterwards), when Beatitude,
and then Lawrence Ferlinghetti in City Lights, first published his ‘Abomunist’ poems
and broadsides, his often jazz-accompanied, Dadaist poetry readings and legendary
‘happenings’ won him the reputation of a Beat irregular, San Francisco’s own one-off
bohemian. His different ‘Abomunist’ papers (Abomunist Manifesto, Second April and Does
the Secret Mind Whisper?), each an anarcho-surreal parody of all ‘isms’ and issued
under the name ‘Bomkauf’, argue for a Beat-derived ‘rejectionary philosophy’. As he
puts matters in ‘Abomunist Manifesto’:
ABOMUNIST POETS CONFIDENT THAT THE NEW LITERARY FORM "FOOTPRINTISM" HAS FREED
THE ARTIST OF OUTMODED RESTRICTIONS SUCH AS: THE ABILITY TO READ AND WRITE, OR THE DESIRE
TO COMMUNICATE, MUST BE PREPARED TO READ THEIR WORK AT DENTAL COLLEGES, EMBALMING SCHOOLS,
HOMES FOR UNWED MOTHERS, HOMES FOR WED MOTHERS, INSANE ASYLUMS, USO CANTEENS,
KINDERGARTENS, AND COUNTYJAILS. ABOMUNISTS NEVER COMPROMISE THEIR REJECIIONARY PHILOSOPHY.
Yet amid the noise, the heat, the often dire turns in his life, Kaufman managed poetry
of genuine distinction as born out in his three principal collections, Solitudes
Crowded With Loneliness (1959), Golden Sardine (1960) and The Ancient Rain:
Poes 1956-1978 (1981).
In Solitudes, Kaufman strikes his own Beat affinity in ‘Afterwards, They Shall
Dance’, a poem in which he claims a lineage with Dylan Thomas (’Wales-bird’), Billie
Holiday (’Lost on the subway and stayed there/forever’), Poe (’died translated, in
unpressed pants’) and, for him, the symboliste master of all, Baudelaire. Only a
dues-paying black Beat, one suspects, would end in terms which resemble both Ginsberg’s
’sunflower Sutra’ and a dreamy, flighted blues:
Whether I am a poet or not, I use fifty dollars’ worth
of air every day, cool.
In order to exist I hide behind stacks of red and blue poems
And open little sensuous parasols, stinging the nail-in-
The foot-song, drinking cool beatitudes.
Nor can the Beat connection be missed in ‘West Coast Sounds 1956′, one of his
best-known ‘Frisco’ compositions, in which he identifies Ginsberg, Corso, Rexroth,
Ferlinghetti, Kerouac and Cassady and himself as co-spirits for a changed America, even to
the point of crowding the East Coast. Jazz and ‘hip’, ’swinging’ and ‘cool’ make
inevitable touchstones:
San Fran, hipster land,
Jazz sounds, wig sounds,
Earthquake sounds, others,
Allen on Chesnutt Street,
Giving poetry to squares
Corso on knees, pleading,
God eyes.
Rexroth, Ferlinghetti,
Swinging, in cellars,
Kerouac at Locke’s,
Writing Neil
on high typewriter,
Neil, booting a choo-choo,
on zigzag tracks.
Now, many cats
Falling in,
New York cats,
Too many cats,
Monterey scene cooler,
San Franers, falling down.
Canneries closing.
Sardines splitting,
For Mexico.
Me too.
This, too, has to be sited alongside poems like ‘Ginsberg (for Allen)’, his surreal,
larky homage to the author of ‘Howl’ (’I have proof that he was Gertrude Stein’s medicine
chest’, ‘I love him because his eyes leak’); like ‘jazz Te Deum for Inhaling at
Mexican Bonfires’, hymn to the possibilities of human exuberance (’Let us walk naked in
radiant glacial rains and cool morphic thunderstorms’); like ‘A Remembered Beat’, with its
play of opposites, to the one side Charlie Parker as ‘a poet in jazz’, Mexico and the
‘hidden Pacific’, and to the other, coercive ‘organization men’ and ‘television love’;
like ‘War Memoir’, his contemplative, Hiroshima-haunted lament at nuclear folly; and like
‘Jail Poems’, his 34-part, moving, self-inquisitorial lyric sequence (’I sit here writing,
not daring to stop./For fear of seeing what’s outside my head’). Solitudes Crowded With
Loneliness made for an auspicious debut.
Though far less even – a suspicion arises that some of the poems were either unfinished
or too hasty – Golden Sardine has its own triumphs. The untitled opening poem, a
bitter, vivid dream sequence based on Carl Chessman in death-row (which oddly anticipates
the execution of Gary Gilmore as told by Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song), exudes
a fierce compassion. The jazz poems, whether ‘Round About Midnight’, ‘Tequila Jazz’, ‘His
Horn’ or ‘Blue O’Clock’, might all have been written by the Beat voice of ‘Night Sung
Sailor’s Prayer’. There, America’s ‘born losers, decaying in sorry jails’, find redemption
(as they do in Ginsberg’s ‘Footnote to Howl’) through the poet’s own life-affirming
articulacy:
Sing love and life and love
All that lives is Holy,
The unholiest, most holy of all.
But the presiding note in Golden Sardine is one of angry, sad revolt at American
venality, materialism and ‘ritual lies’, a revolt, however, redeemed from solemnity or
mere complaint by Kaufman’s linguistic energy and flair. His poem, ‘On’, set out in serial
form, envisages an America of disjunctures and fracture, beginning, ‘On yardbird corners
of embryonic hopes, drowned in a heroin tear’ and moving through to ‘On lonely poet
corners of low lying leaves & moist prophet eyes’. The view is one from the Beat or
Hipster margins, appalled at American conformity, the ‘comic-book seduction’, the ‘motion
picture corners of lassie & other symbols’. It is, too, a view unmistakably Kaufman’s
own.
In his Introduction to The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978, Kaufman’s editor,
Raymond Foye, rightly characterises the later work as ’some of the finest … of his
career – simple, lofty, resplendent’. Two poems especially do service. In ‘War Memoir:
Jazz, Don’t Listen To At Your own Risk’, he makes jazz a counterweight, a moral balance,
to war and rapacity (’While jazz blew in the night/suddenly we were too busy to hear a
sound’). He also focuses on the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (’busy humans were/Busy
burning Japanese in atomicolorcinescope/With stereophonic screams,/What
one-hundred-percent red-blooded savage would waste time/Listening to jazz, with so many
important things going on . . .’). For Kaufman, jazz, ‘living sound’, so restores and
harmonizes, a (Beat?) act of life over death. Or as he himself puts it: ‘jazz, scratching,
digging, bluing, swinging jazz,/And we listen/And we feel/And live’.
In ‘Like Father, Like Sun’, with Lorca as tutelary spirit, he again invokes an America
of life – from New Orleans to the Mississippi to the ‘Apache, Kiowa, and Sioux ranges’-
against a ‘rainless’, ‘fungus’ America. But his ending looks even further, to a
pluralised, uncoercive, universal nation – to, as it were, Emerson’s ‘poem’ America:
The poem comes
Across centuries of holy ties, and weeping heaven’s eyes,
Africa’s black handkerchief, washed clean by her children’s honor,
As cruelly designed anniversaries spin in my mind,
Airy voice of all those fires of love I burn in memory of
America is a promised land, a garden torn from naked stone,
A place where the losers in earth’s conflicts can enjoy their triumph.
All losers, brown, red, black, and white; the colors from the
Master Palette.
Kaufman’s ‘Like Father, Like Sun’ no doubt bespeaks his own pains, his own will to
redemption. But as in the poems of Jones/Baraka and Joans, it equally seeks to ’signify’
at a wider level: nothing other than the exposure of America and beyond to a black
beatitude.
From The Beat Generation Writers. Ed. A. Robert Lee. Copyright ? 1996 by
Lumiere (Cooperative) Press Ltd. And Pluto Press.
BOB KAUFMAN: JAZZ POET OF THE
STREETS
by C. Natale Peditto
Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) was a legend to his own
and succeeding generations of poets while he was still alive but has yet to obtain the
literary stature granted to his fellow contemporaries, such as Ginsberg, Kerouac,
Corso, Ferlinghetti and Baraka. Still, he is a seminal member of a distinctly
American movement of poets, an archetypal figure of the Beat movement, especially as a
member of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance and the general community of North Beach
artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In Kaufman’s case, biographical (including
autobiographical) material is sparse?never easily defined, he was, essentially, an
autodidact and internationalist; in his youth, a sailor of the seven seas; a union
organizer and orator in the South and on the Westcoast docks; an intimate of New York
City’s Bop figures Charlie "Bird" Parker (for whom Kaufman named his only son,
Parker), Thelonius Monk and Charles Mingus. Bob Kaufman was a rambling man of the world
and eternal social outsider who could recite T. S. Eliot and Garcia Lorca by heart and who
created his own spontaneous surrealist verse.
Kaufman’s notoriety as a poet has often been
associated with his public visibility and outrageous antics as a radical street poet; he
often incurred the wrath of the local police simply for reciting his poetry aloud in
public, and it is said that in 1959 alone, at the height of the "beatnik" fad,